In writer Taylor Sheridan’s Western series, 1923, there is a great scene in the third episode (which I will paraphrase) when the show’s Montana cattle-ranching family rides into town and finds a man selling futuristic wares on the street. What’s that crazy thing? Well, ma’am, it’s a washing machine. And that? A refrigerator for keeping food cold. Oh, my. How do they work? They run on electricity through power lines straight into your home. They are modern conveniences that do your chores for you.
Amid the general euphoria among those seeing such strange inventions for the first time, one of the brash, young cowboys asks discerningly, “So you sell electricity, and then you rent all the things that need electricity?” The salesman reluctantly agrees but insists the new appliances will provide time for fun and leisure. “But that ain’t more leisurely,” the young cowboy replies, “because we gotta work more to pay for all this stuff.” The salesman quickly points out that every home in New York City will soon have all these technologies and more. The cowboy shakes his head in disgust and provides a fine lesson on economic freedom: “No, here’s the thing, we buy all this stuff, we’re not working for ourselves anymore. We’re working for you.”
I wish every American (especially the youngest generations) would watch that scene a hundred times and think clearly about its implications. What does it say about our way of life when most of us pay so many different kinds of recurring bills just to stay in our own homes? Property taxes, municipal fees, state taxes, federal taxes, water, electric, natural gas — all just to get started. Want to communicate with the outside world or enjoy some basic entertainment? Those services will require more subscription fees that will certainly rise in price without end. It is almost impossible to own any home free from the threat of future encumbrances. Even a remote dweller in a forgotten cabin in the distant woods still owes the taxman — and failure to pay means some government agent will eventually knock on his hard-to-find door and seize that cabin in the government’s name. One’s private home is never really one’s own.
If that early-twentieth-century ranching family took a look at how our society functions today, would it conclude that we are “modern”? Or would it decide that we are the ones who have traveled back in time to an age of serfdom and indentured servitude?
Residents of New York City pay thousands of dollars each month in rent and utilities, and most never own anything. Those who do own an apartment or condo pay fortunes for places smaller than the living rooms of some of the smallest homes in the Midwest. Those same New Yorkers who “own homes” still shell out condo and maintenance fees in perpetuity. The price of “big city” electricity rises rather precipitously, and transit fees always go up. By the time some “modern” NYC worker signs up for a basic monthly serving of “Netflix and chill,” most of what a person earns each month ends up in somebody else’s pocket. In New York City and so many metropolitan areas like it, too many residents live paycheck-to-paycheck — even the “wealthy” ones.
A large number of Americans have been conditioned to accept this way of life as perfectly normal. For a person who believes city-life makes sense, globalism probably makes sense, too. When the World Economic Forum’s aspiring tyrant, Klaus Schwab, promises that most of the planet will eventually “own nothing and be happy,” a lot of city people nod their heads in agreement. They already own nothing. But are they really happy?
The return of President Trump is causing tremendous consternation for all kinds of people. He represents a particularly serious threat, though, to Schwab-aligned globalists and their dreams of a “Utopian” future where “elites” own everything and “commoners” rent for life. Trump could have run an entire political campaign on this issue alone. He was busy speaking about the dangers of a wide-open border, “green new deal”-induced inflation, and the stupidity of forever-wars. But a single overarching objective addresses all these problems: returning America to the path of an ownership society.
Dreams of ownership enticed our ancestors to leave the Old World and build a new country. They did not want to work other people’s lands. They did not want to be taxed by feudal lords for the rest of their lives. They wanted to own the fruits of their labor. They wanted to own their own farms. They wanted complete control over their economic fortunes — beholden to no-one. Needless to say, most of their descendants have forgotten why freedom is impossible without private property. Renting everything from a handful of oligarchs and governments, as Sheridan’s cowboy points out, means that we end up working entirely for them and never for ourselves.
President Trump has surprised a lot of people during his first month back in office by concentrating heavily on (1) eliminating wasteful (and fraudulent) government spending, (2) cutting unnecessary (and therefore harmful) regulations, and (3) pushing for an overhaul of our current system of taxation. What he’s trying to accomplish is much bigger than most people could have guessed. He is not only implementing reciprocal tariffs as a way to bring long-lost manufacturing and industry jobs back home but also setting the stage to greatly reduce individual tax burdens. He is committed to relieving Americans of income taxes that disincentivize hard work and dampen entrepreneurial spirits. Taxing a person’s labor is both immoral and detrimental to a nation’s aggregate wealth.
Inflation is also a tax. When central banks print currency, they devalue our paychecks and our savings without ever passing legislation for higher taxes. That stolen wealth artificially inflates the sticker price of stocks and other assets. Companies traded on Wall Street see their currency-denominated valuations rise even though their companies have created no new real value (quite fraudulently, failing companies are “juiced” to look “successful”). This kind of fake economic “growth” creates market bubbles and inevitable crashes. Who benefits? Those who take their inflated market “winnings” out before the crash — by and large, the same oligarchs who turned on the central bank money-printing spigots in the first place. They steal from the poor to further enrich the obscenely wealthy.
What’s the point? The Trump administration sees the next four years as the last chance to save the dollar. Americans should not have to invest in a manipulated stock market just to have something for retirement. A dollar tucked under the mattress today should buy a person just as much in fifty years’ time. Otherwise, a worker still doesn’t own the fruits of his labor. He remains a serf tethered to the Federal Reserve’s fake-money fields. Real economic growth requires sound money.
A society that values private property is a society that values freedom. In a lecture delivered more than twenty years before the publication of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith described what separates great and powerful nations from weak and despotic ones:
“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.”
Smith’s concise prescription for national greatness is President Trump’s MAGA playbook in a nutshell. As the Montana cowboys would say, this is how we get back to working for ourselves.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
